I don't know the answer, but with the internet and analytics, we've seen media become more sensationalistic to get those clicks and views. So this is a possibility that should be considered.
One side has cameras. The other side has guns. When violence happens, who's fault do you think it is?
The next night their tactics changed, for the better, a similar after-curfew protest group was warned, given time, and everybody remaining was encircled by a close knit line of police and every single person was arrested. The second tactic had a much better outcome, it seemed.
There were reporters stationed on the outskirts of the crowd but between the crowd and police, and I saw some of them get teargassed. In that case it had more to do with wind and proximity than being targeted. Much different than police actively going after reporters, but sources like this one don't seem to differentiate between collateral damage from proximity and direct targeting of media teams.
Also, police in gas masks, partially for tear gas protection, partially for covid protection, facing crowd who at times have attacked police, they can't see very well, they are under enormous amounts of stress, and few of them have experience doing anything like this... if you pull back from the blame, talking about rights and duties, and just focus for a minute on the humanity... ask yourself how are these people going to fail? You'd probably come up with a lot of the ways the police indeed are failing. Now in the same context think of how those failures could be reduced without thinking about blame... and it's hard. It's a hard problem.
Just like failures in a tech stack and a team of programmers, blame is not the path to solving problems. You don't go find the guy who wrote the bug and shout at him or send him to jail or fire him or string him up in the public square, you write unit tests, you write post-mortems, you make backups, you make new monitors... in short you find the sources of problems, you investigate them, and you solve them. That sort of thought about failure needs to happen more in software, and it needs to happen more in the rest of life too. Recognizing failures, having empathy for those who fail, realizing the source of those failures is systematic, and working on systematic solutions.
The state (or city, or nation, where appropriate)? Absolutely, but only when absolutely necessary. (like curfew orders which follow widespread disorder and destruction)
That's a hard argument to make.
When and where did this happen? The first step is verbally telling people to clear the area.
>If you tell a journalist they are under arrest, they will always comply. They won't fight back. So yes, still cops' fault.
Given the fact that the police are always outnumbered in these situations, and vehicles, jails and officers have limited capacity, arresting everyone who doesn't comply is impossible. So they are first asked to leave. If they don't they are pushed out of the area by force.
If reporters are too close to the police line that is pushing people they will get pushed along with everyone else. Breaking the line weakens it and hampers the police's efforts.